Oct 3 2023
By:
Scott Sumner
Bloomberg has a new piece suggesting that a recession may be immanent: …And Fed Hikes Are About to Bite Hard “Monetary policy,” Milton Friedman famously said, “operates with long and variable lags.” One subtlety here is that the “variable” can refer not just to differences between one recession and an...
Oct 3 2023
By:
Kevin Corcoran
I’ve talked before how certain ideas or lessons in economics can be found in works of fiction, such as how Bryan Caplan’s idea of rational irrationality was illustrated in an episode of House, M.D. It turns out there are a few different ideas illustrated in Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22. For those who hav...
Oct 2 2023
By:
David Henderson
One economist who was a teenager in Chile during the Allende years was Sebastian Edwards, now an economics professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. Edwards has written a book that has been badly needed: a fairly objective analysis of the economics and politics of economic policy in Chile ...
Oct 2 2023
By:
Pierre Lemieux
When bureaucrats and politicians (including 17 state attorney generals) attack a successful, entrepreneurial company, is it surprising that it looks like a circus? On the suit of the Federal Trade Commission against Amazon, I read in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal (“Lina Khan Once Went Big Against Amazon. As FTC Ch...
Oct 1 2023
By:
Scott Sumner
What causes societies to fail? One possibility is that they enter a zero sum death spiral. Here's the basic problem: 1. Zero sum thinking causes bad economic policies. 2. Bad economic policies cause a poor economic outcome. 3. A poor economic outcome causes zero sum thinking. Rinse and repeat. ...
Oct 1 2023
By:
David Henderson
Timothy Taylor, "Some Economics of Pharmacy Benefit Managers," The Conversable Economist, September 28, 2023. This is the nicest treatment of the facts that I've seen. I confess that I've seen PBMs as something of a black box rather than doing the standard middleman treatment that Tim does. Tim highlights the work o...
Oct 1 2023
By:
Pierre Lemieux
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) issued an order against a request by KalshiEX LLC to intermediate a betting market on who will control Congress. You would think, wouldn’t you, that betting on politics as politicians bet on your future (just consider the federal debt, which increases by trillions of do...
Read this Pierre Lemieux Liberty Classic
Nov 5 2018
By Pierre Lemieux
James Buchanan is not easy to categorize. Is he a libertarian? A classical liberal? A conservative? Or perhaps even a "liberal" in the modern American sense of "progressive" or "social democrat"? Is he an economist or a philosopher? It is paradoxical but not totally wrong to answer "all of the above," so complex and ri...
Sep 30 2023
By:
David Henderson
As more and more state governments legalize recreational use of marijuana—14 had done so by 2021—an obvious question to ask is, will the amount of legal marijuana sold and consumed eventually exceed the amount of illegal marijuana sold and consumed? Thinking through the economics, my answer would have bee...
Sep 29 2023
By:
Scott Sumner
In my previous post, I looked at the development of modern macroeconomics. Several commenters responded by discussing what they thought was wrong with macro. Here I'll put in my own two cents, and then explain how my views relate to those of my commenters. In my view, the biggest problem with modern macro is the treat...
Sep 29 2023
By:
Kevin Corcoran
Recently, the head of Microsoft’s Xbox gaming division, Phil Spencer, gained some attention when he acknowledged that Xbox has lost the so-called “console wars” against Sony and Nintendo. He goes on to suggest that the current difficulties facing the Xbox business stems from the fact that they “lost the worst g...
Sep 29 2023
By:
David Henderson
You didn't like the blue one? Eric Boehm, in "Taylor Swift, Junk Fees, and the 'Happy Meal' Fallacy," Reason, October 2023, does a nice job of explaining the case for, in some instances, charging separately for some components of a purchase rather than for bundling. In his State of the Union address, President Bi...
Sep 28 2023
By:
Scott Sumner
Has macroeconomics progressed over the past 100 years, or are we merely treading water? There are good arguments for both sides. Before considering macroeconomics, I use an analogy in the field of urban planning. Then I'll argue that macro looks a lot better if we view it as a series of "critiques", not a series of mod...
Sep 28 2023
By:
Adam Martin
In a previous post, I challenged James Broughel's recent suggestion that libertarians should re-evaluate their allegiance to the legacy of James Buchanan. There I focused on Broughel's claims regarding Buchanan's radical subjectivism. In this piece, I turn to the implications for welfare economics. In his piece, Bro...
Sep 27 2023
By:
David Henderson
You don’t have to study federal budget data closely to know that the only way to reduce the huge budget deficits over the next 10 years, while avoiding tax increases, is to cut the growth rate of spending. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that federal spending in 2023 will come in at a whopping 24.2 percent ...
Sep 27 2023
By:
Kevin Corcoran
It turns out that economists who have stressed the significance of the knowledge problem and the importance of information had it all wrong. At least, that’s the case if the socialist writer Nathan Robinson is to be believe. On Twitter (yes, I refuse to call the platform X, and you can’t make me), Robinson explains...